Why had Luke Marks driven specially out to Windee? Had he been murdered or had he, as the local police believed, wandered away from his car and been overwhelmed in a dust-storm? When Bony noticed something odd in the background of a police photograph, he begins to piece together the secrets of the sands of Windee. Here is the original background to the infamous Snowy Rowles murder trial. Napoleon Bonaparte my best detective. - Daily Mail

Somewhere within Arthur Upfield's travelling dray were the clues to uncovering three acts of murder involving the grifter, Snowy Rowles. Once Upfield had published his crime thriller, The Sands of Windee, West Australian police gave chase, starting with the esteemed author of Bony...

The Answerth family's mansion seems to deserve its nickname of Venom House - perhaps because of its forbidding setting, an island in the centre of a man-made lake, its treacherous waters studded by the skeletons of long-dead trees. Perhaps it's because of the unquiet ghosts of the Aboriginals slaughtered by the Answerth ancestors. Whatever the reason, most people are content to give Venom House and its occupants a wide berth... until a couple of corpses turn up in the lake... The strength of Upfield's accomplishment in this book is so overwhelming it makes the reader cower. The characters are well-developed, the conversation vernacular for the Australian outback, and the development compelling. The story is the nearest Upfield comes to a story that would have made Edgar Allen Poe envious, Upfield maintains a kind of corpse-like humour which is very amusing... The whole book is first-class Upfield and first-class crime fiction. - from The Spirit of Australia by Ray Browne.

The discovery of a stolen red monoplane on the dry, flat bottom of Emu Lake meant many things for different folks. For Elizabeth Nettlefold, the chance to nurse its strangely ill meant renewed purpose in life. For Dr Knowles, brilliant physician and town drunk, it meant the revival of a romantic dream. For some it meant a murder plan gone awry, and for Bonaparte, it meant one of the toughest cases of his career. Bony - a unique figure among top-flight detectives. - BBC

A cat... a ping-pong ball... a drunken gardener... With these slight clues to go on Detective-Inspector Bonaparte investigates the mysterious death of famous author, Mervyn Blake, who dies an agonising death late one night in his writing room. But how did he die? No one knows. No one that is until Bony's acute observation of human nature uncovers the murderer - and the method used to kill Blake. One of the few Bonaparte mysteries not set in the outback, reveals Upfield at his best and most ingenious. Napoleon Bonaparte - my best detective. - Daily Express

Murder down under. The car lies wrecked and abandoned near the world's longest fence, the "rabbit-proof fence" in the wheat belt of Western Australia. There is no sign of its owner. Has George Loftus simply decamped, for reasons of his own? Or was it murder? Bonaparte suspects the worst and is determined to find the body - and the murderer.